1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to processes that support the enforcement of preferences for the availability of subscriber resources hosted by telecommunication networks, and especially mobile telephone networks and networks with multimedia capability. In particular, the invention pertains to processes for deciding when, where, how and to whom such resources will be available.
2. Description of Prior Art
Operators of fixed land telephone networks, mobile telephone networks and other telecommunication networks, including those with multimedia capability, are interested in providing mechanisms to expose the many intrinsic resources that reside inside the networks. These resources include information about the presence and location of subscribers, billing services, etc. This exposure will enable application providers to quickly and easily develop applications that make use of these resources and introduce services providing new revenue sources to the network operators. The path that many operators are taking to open up their networks, while pursuing the goal of ensuring compatibility of applications crossing multiple networks, has been to standardize access to network resources via APIs accessible from Network Service Gateways. However, much of the data and resources exposed by the Network Service Gateways directly concerns subscribers. Subscribers will be very reluctant to embrace any application that uses their presence and location if there are no security and privacy guarantees on who is allowed to make use of the data.
There already exist a variety of mechanisms to control the exposure of certain information coming from the networks. For example, one can make a telephone number private to conceal the telephone number from caller identification exposure. Another example is presence information in Instant Messaging (IM) Systems. Subscribers can set their presence to “invisible” so that others cannot see the presence of the subscriber in the system. A limitation of these models is that a subscriber is restricted to exposing the information in the same way to all interested parties. A telephone number is private to all caller identification recipients and the presence of a subscriber in an IM system is the same to all watchers. This limitation arises because the decision of whether to block the phone number or the current status of presence of a subscriber is obtained from a fixed attribute associated with the subscriber. Data such as who is requesting the information or to whom the information is about to be revealed is not taken into account. There is also more dynamic data that could be taken into consideration when exposing the subscriber resources kept inside a network. This may include the time when the request is made, the location of the requester and the subscriber, the cost of the application, the balance in a subscriber's account, etc. At present, such information is not available to inquiring entities.